Quote:
Originally Posted by GuerraCivil
For what I have read Chinese Communists did have both pilots and planes by 1945 and they were also put in operational use. The first Chinese communist aviators were educated in Soviet Union already by the late 1930´s. Chinese "Red" Air Force had even their own roundels before the establishment of People´s Republic of China and PLAAF (People´s Liberation Army Airforce).
My guess is that the airwar of Chinese Civil War is nowadays a bit sensitive and likely forgotten subject in China for following reasons:
- the Kuomingtang Air Force is nowadays recognized as the one which practically did all the fighting in air during the Chinese-Japanese war 1937 - 1945 and this has now become a common heritage both in mainland China and Taiwan
- Japanese aviators serving Communist Chinese Air Force are probably men which are problematic piece of Chinese aviation history due to common China/Taiwan heritage regarding Sino-Japanese War.
- the whole memory of Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949 is problematic if one considers the attempts to improve relationships between China and Taiwan: the common war against Japanese fits better to common history heritage.
So it is easier to start the history of PLAAF from 1949 when PRC was established and just forget/skip the history before that. But that is not the whole truth, as PLAAF was not created from zero in 1949 and its prehistory deserves attention.
There should be soon a Osprey book of ROCAF Aces (Kuomintang/Taiwanese ace pilots) and it is interesting to see if it touches this subject from the Taiwanese point of view.
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Don't get me wrong, Chinese communist did have handful cadets trained by Soviet in 30's and 40's, and after Japanese surrendered, they did took over a few Japanese airports, but majority of Japanese aircrafts they found were nothing but junk destroyed by Japanese themselves, only one traniner was captured in a flyable condition, communists choosed a few cadets from infantry (mostly junior officers) and persuades a few JAAF officers to train them on that aircraft. After the civil war broke out, there were sereral case of Nationalist pilots defected to communist, but communist at that time did not have any ability to support these aircrafts, they had neither spare part nor functional airports, so these aircrafts were either destroy by nationalist bombing or by communist themselve to prevent them falling in the hands of nationalist. Only in early 1949, when big cities such as Beijng start falling into communist, and a large number of aircrafts were either captured on the ground or defect to them, communist had the ability to create their own airforce. Then Soviet came to help, and the baptism of fire for the communist Chiese airforce was Korea war.